Described in the 1985 book The Klingon Dictionary by Marc Okrand and deliberately designed to sound "alien", it has a number of typologically uncommon features.

The language's basic sound, along with a few words, was devised by actor James Doohan ("Scotty") and producer Jon Povill for Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Because its vocabulary is heavily centered on Star Trek-Klingon concepts such as spacecraft or warfare, it can be hard for everyday use because of the lack of words for a casual conversation.

[6] For Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), director Leonard Nimoy and writer-producer Harve Bennett wanted the Klingons to speak a structured language instead of random gibberish, and so commissioned a full language, based on the phrases Doohan had originated, from Marc Okrand, who had earlier constructed four lines of Vulcan dialogue for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Kruge's starship after his death, as the survivors of the Enterprise's self-destruction transport up from the crumbling Genesis Planet to the Klingon ship.

[9] With the advent of the series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987)—in which one of the main characters, Worf, was a Klingon—and successors, the language and various cultural aspects for the fictional species were expanded.

In the episode "A Matter of Honor", several members of a Klingon ship's crew speak a language that is not translated for the benefit of the viewer (even Commander Riker, enjoying the benefits of a universal translator, is unable to understand) until one Klingon orders the others to "speak their [i.e., human] language".

[10] A small number of non-Klingon characters were later depicted in Star Trek as having learned to speak Klingon, notably Jean-Luc Picard and Dax.

At least nine Klingon translations of works of world literature have been published, among which are: Hamlet (Hamlet), ghIlghameS (The Epic of Gilgamesh), paghmoʼ tIn mIS (Much Ado About Nothing), pInʼaʼ qan paQDIʼnorgh (Tao Te Ching), Sun pInʼaʼ veS mIw (The Art of War), chIjwI' tIQ bom (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner), 'aS 'IDnar pIn'a' Dun (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz), taʼpuq mach (The Little Prince), and QelIS boqHarmey (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland).

The Shakespearean choices were inspired by a remark from High Chancellor Gorkon in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, who said, "You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon."

He therefore avoided patterns that are typologically common and deliberately chose features that occur relatively infrequently in human languages.

Arika Okrent guessed in her 2009 book In the Land of Invented Languages that there might be 20–30 fluent speakers.

After proving popular, the company offered to promote it from beta status, but due to ongoing software issues regarding Klingon's unexpected use of upper- and lower-case letters and the apostrophe as a consonant instead of punctuation, the course developers chose not to accept the offer until the problems were addressed.

In the 2017 film Please Stand By, in which a young autistic woman played by Dakota Fanning leaves her group home in San Francisco to deliver a Star Trek screenplay she wrote to Paramount Pictures, a Los Angeles police officer played by Patton Oswalt coaxes her out of hiding by speaking with her in Klingon.

Following a formal questioning of the Economy Minister Edwina Hart regarding the funding of research into UFO sightings around Cardiff Airport by Member of the Senedd Darren Millar.

[33] On September 25, 2010, the Washington Shakespeare Company (now known as WSC Avant Bard) performed selections from Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing in the Klingon language in Arlington County, Virginia.

[43][44] It can do a good job with individual words, and with phrases included in its training corpus, but it is not well tuned for Klingon's system of prefixes and suffixes.

[46] They can be enabled like any other language provided by the streaming service, and are shown using romanized transliteration rather than Klingon script.

In 2020 the German artist Hans Solo (Äi-Tiem) released an EP NuqneH, whose 5 tracks are completely rapped in Klingon language.

Only words and grammatical forms introduced by Marc Okrand are considered canonical Klingon by the KLI and most Klingonists.

[51] However, as the growing number of speakers employ different strategies to express themselves, it is often unclear as to what level of neologism is permissible.

When initially developed, Paramount Pictures (owners of the Star Trek franchise) wanted the Klingon language to be guttural and harsh and Okrand wanted it to be unusual, so he selected sounds that combined in ways not generally found in other languages.

In the discussion below, standard Klingon orthography appears in ⟨angle brackets⟩, and the phonemic transcription in the International Phonetic Alphabet is written between /slashes/.

Thus, ta "record", tar "poison" and targh "targ" (a type of animal) are all legal syllable forms, but *tarD and *ar are not.

For items that are neither body parts nor capable of speech, the suffix is -mey, such as in Hovmey ("stars"), or targhmey ("targs") for a Klingon animal somewhat resembling a boar.

Verbs are marked for aspect, certainty, predisposition and volition, dynamic, causative, mood, negation, and honorific.

One phoneme, the vowel I, is written capital to look more like the IPA symbol for the sound /ɪ/, and can pose problems when writing Klingon in sans-serif fonts such as Arial, as it looks almost the same as the consonant l. This has led some Klingon enthusiasts to write it lowercase like the other vowels ("i") to prevent confusion, but this use is non-canonical.

When Klingon symbols are used in Star Trek productions, they are merely decorative graphic elements, designed to emulate real writing and create an appropriate atmosphere.

Though the explanation was of course humorous in nature, as part of the practical joke a series of real fonts based upon the most commonly used pIqaD character mapping were in fact developed, and have been made available for free download.

[7] Sources for the vocabulary include English (albeit heavily disguised), and also Yiddish: SaʼHut for "buttocks" (from תּחת tuches spelled backwards),[7] and ʼoyʼ for "ache, pain, sore" (cf.